![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rabid1stBut this is not an official pony post. As a matter of fact, this is a bit personal...and so...somewhat of a departure for me.
Stephen Fry, whom I have always adored, has answered a letter that his 16 year old self wrote to his adult self at some point in childhood. Stephen and I are also very similar in many ways. I think some of you may already suspect that I am actually not a former Miss Wyoming but am, in fact, a middle-aged, somewhat portly, definitely geeky, gay man from England. :grin:
Stephen writes...to his 16 year old self...
"This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love.
He goes on to talk about love and how it is universal, not something that only young boys or gay people feel but something that we all should be open to and are influenced by to a great extent. And this, I feel ties in with what I have said all along about the Pony.
So many people have told me, speaking from bitter experience, that there is no way we can have a pony in our story...because True Love simply doesn't exist and so the mature thing to do is to accept the half-measures you are given. All there is to do in life is compromise. This is not to say that you behave in a mature fashion and accept some weaknesses in your "soulmate" but instead that you simply give up on the idea of love all together and take whatever solace you can get in life...sex, children, money, Ten 2. It is interesting to note that Stephen does not equate happiness with love. Neither do I. I do not think that Rose and Ten would be endlessly happy together...I think that they could be true to their feelings together.
The few people that have come with me to this point are people who still believe that, even if love has failed, it doesn't ALWAYS fail. People who instinctively know that their inner 16 year old wants the fairytales from childhood to be true for someone, somewhere. And, I think, you are people who know that love takes a bit of hard work.
But my need for the pony goes even beyond wanting the fairytale to work out...I think...
Stephen again...
I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.
So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you.
The pony is about love, yes, but it is also about integrity, doing what is right for your characters, for your story. It is about me and those people like me who feel disenfranchised by modern commercial storytelling which is all about emotional manipulation with little attention paid to the whole of the tale.
I want to know that there are people like me in the world who have commercial success and retain their sense of childlike wonder. I want confirmation that there are writers who know how to tell stories properly, with integrity, even in this day and age of abject cynicism. I want the great spirits to confirm my hope that my own impulses and desires are not so very out of step with the world as a whole that I can never hope to succeed. I don't want to concede that my true feelings, my passions, my understandings are signs of immaturity and must be set aside if my writing is ever to be appreciated in my time.
To me, the hope of the pony represents my true self...not a romantic, exactly, because this isn't really about the romance...it is about not being afraid of the romance when going to that point in the story is the right and honorable thing to do. If you have written a story about two people who routinely do the impossible...and long most of all to be together...don't tell me it's impossible for them to be together and just expect me to accept that. Because people who leap across dimensions, rewrite history, foil vast alien armies, stop the devil from breaking free of his chains and absorb Time Vortexes so that they can create immortal, equally legendary, characters...deserve the suspension of disbelief required to get them a truly happy ending.
I know this is all quite personal and I'm sorry about that. And it is waaaaaay too much pressure to put on poor old Russell and his little show. But that is the truth of it...I want Russell to stand up for love, because he made Doctor Who a love story...and I (and I think many other people) would be emboldened by knowing that a brilliant soul like RTD...shared some of the same impulses and desires as we childlike viewers. That he just needed the story to work out properly...to be one of the epic love stories in history...and he worked backward from the happy ending to make it so.
Read Stephen's full letter (which is about the gay experience for the most part...but also about universal emotions) here-->> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/30/stephen-fry-letter-gay-rights
Stephen Fry, whom I have always adored, has answered a letter that his 16 year old self wrote to his adult self at some point in childhood. Stephen and I are also very similar in many ways. I think some of you may already suspect that I am actually not a former Miss Wyoming but am, in fact, a middle-aged, somewhat portly, definitely geeky, gay man from England. :grin:
Stephen writes...to his 16 year old self...
"This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love.
He goes on to talk about love and how it is universal, not something that only young boys or gay people feel but something that we all should be open to and are influenced by to a great extent. And this, I feel ties in with what I have said all along about the Pony.
So many people have told me, speaking from bitter experience, that there is no way we can have a pony in our story...because True Love simply doesn't exist and so the mature thing to do is to accept the half-measures you are given. All there is to do in life is compromise. This is not to say that you behave in a mature fashion and accept some weaknesses in your "soulmate" but instead that you simply give up on the idea of love all together and take whatever solace you can get in life...sex, children, money, Ten 2. It is interesting to note that Stephen does not equate happiness with love. Neither do I. I do not think that Rose and Ten would be endlessly happy together...I think that they could be true to their feelings together.
The few people that have come with me to this point are people who still believe that, even if love has failed, it doesn't ALWAYS fail. People who instinctively know that their inner 16 year old wants the fairytales from childhood to be true for someone, somewhere. And, I think, you are people who know that love takes a bit of hard work.
But my need for the pony goes even beyond wanting the fairytale to work out...I think...
Stephen again...
I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.
So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you.
The pony is about love, yes, but it is also about integrity, doing what is right for your characters, for your story. It is about me and those people like me who feel disenfranchised by modern commercial storytelling which is all about emotional manipulation with little attention paid to the whole of the tale.
I want to know that there are people like me in the world who have commercial success and retain their sense of childlike wonder. I want confirmation that there are writers who know how to tell stories properly, with integrity, even in this day and age of abject cynicism. I want the great spirits to confirm my hope that my own impulses and desires are not so very out of step with the world as a whole that I can never hope to succeed. I don't want to concede that my true feelings, my passions, my understandings are signs of immaturity and must be set aside if my writing is ever to be appreciated in my time.
To me, the hope of the pony represents my true self...not a romantic, exactly, because this isn't really about the romance...it is about not being afraid of the romance when going to that point in the story is the right and honorable thing to do. If you have written a story about two people who routinely do the impossible...and long most of all to be together...don't tell me it's impossible for them to be together and just expect me to accept that. Because people who leap across dimensions, rewrite history, foil vast alien armies, stop the devil from breaking free of his chains and absorb Time Vortexes so that they can create immortal, equally legendary, characters...deserve the suspension of disbelief required to get them a truly happy ending.
I know this is all quite personal and I'm sorry about that. And it is waaaaaay too much pressure to put on poor old Russell and his little show. But that is the truth of it...I want Russell to stand up for love, because he made Doctor Who a love story...and I (and I think many other people) would be emboldened by knowing that a brilliant soul like RTD...shared some of the same impulses and desires as we childlike viewers. That he just needed the story to work out properly...to be one of the epic love stories in history...and he worked backward from the happy ending to make it so.
Read Stephen's full letter (which is about the gay experience for the most part...but also about universal emotions) here-->> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/30/stephen-fry-letter-gay-rights
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-30 10:09 pm (UTC)Wonderful stuff, Rae. You almost made me cry. I want to believe David Tennant is of like mind. I find it impossible to believe he isn't after all I've heard of him publicly (and that doesn't mean I put him on a pedestal, by any means).
And DT has changed my life. Absolutely no question about that. Without him I would not be studying now, and I would not have learned to believe in myself again. Two things in particular changed my life - seeing Love's Labour's Lost at the Globe (which came about because an flister and fellow fan was desperate to go) and then seeing Hamlet. That's when I knew I had to study Shakespeare again, after a gap of over 20 years.
But the interesting thing is, the intellectual journey is continuing for me, maybe even beyond Shakespeare. My MA studies has given me a passionate interest in cultural theory, narrative and genre - and all that follows from Doctor Who. If RTD doesn't deliver, I will keep searching and studying and writing about what went wrong. I've a feeling that might, just might, lead me to Cardiff University, an academic called Matt Hills and maybe even a thesis on Doctor Who.
Which is more than I ever intended to write - sorry!
One final thought. If you don't follow Paul Cornell's blog, I think you'd love it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-30 10:21 pm (UTC)And, thanks for responding to my post...I feel silly saying all that...but it is the truth...I want to believe there are other people like me in the world. And, yes, I do think that cynicism and just an overall bleakness is part of the experience of being a teenager. Oddly enough, I think it is a reaction to having the spiritual truths of your soul denied by the world around you...it's a reaction to letting go of the dream of unconditional love. Then, as you say, often you recover that truth as you truly mature. You come to understand that love IS real after all...and you had it...or have it. As Stephen says in his letter back to himself.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-30 11:03 pm (UTC)I was very moved by the honesty and depth of this entry. You hit many points that splinter into multifaceted layers...
YANA in your desire to saddle up the pony and ride into the happily ever after sunset. It's a nice change of pace in today's world. :)
I second the Paul Cornell blog.
Happy New Year!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-31 12:43 am (UTC)My problem is that when I saw the movie "Dead Poets Society" for the first time, the scene were Robert Sean Leonard walks down the stairs to commit suicide, I could actually feel the complete emptiness, the nothingness that the character must have felt at that point. I could understand that there was nothing worth living for anymore.
And that scared me.
I'd rather be hurt and feel pain, than feel like that ever again. Or actually not feel. I'll take any feeling thrown at me rather than feel nothing. It's worth it in the end. All the pain, the tears, it's worth it. I believe in that. I believe that happiness isn't true happiness if you haven't gone through those emotions. And I believe that you can't be continuously happy, there have to be ups and downs or you won't be able to appreciate the ups.
My s.o. mocks me sometimes because I invest so much feelings in movies, books, or TV series. He enjoys all these things, but mostly on an intellectual level (strangely enough, Japanese cat movies make him cry every time). For me, I have to invest feelings in it, otherwise what's the point? How can I enjoy something if I don't feel it?
Strangely enough, I think Doomsday might have worked for me as ending, but JE does not. Because if I'd be Rose, I wouldn't be able to give up on the Doctor, after having beaten "impossible". Oh, intellectually, I'd know that it'd be better to accept what cards have been dealt and live your life, but it wouldn't work completely. I'd always have doubts...
I don't think that it's really possible to know what the Doctor feels, him being an alien and all that :), but what we see on our screens shows that he isn't able to accept it either. He tries and tries and ultimately fails. And that's not how you end a story. At least not in Doctor Who. As RTD wrote, you have to end it on an upbeat note. And that's what I believe in for now.
And I had no idea :) I would have gone with Miss Wyoming in her 30ies, but either works for me!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-31 03:10 am (UTC)But now, having gone through that, gotten divorced, had lots of therapy and such...I'm back to my teenage beliefs. There ARE people who are meant to be together and - the most important lesson in my case - DO. NOT. SETTLE. It's not worth it.
Which of course means that I don't want to settle for the half-assed solution that RTD presented us in JE. Not that I don't understand what he was trying to do (find some way for the Doctor and Rose to be together and still have a show), but it rings incredibly false. I read his book, too, but even if I hadn't, it's obvious that he was having difficulty with the ending. And in the end...he settled. Said "good enough"...but it's not!
I think that it would take a lot of courage to stand up to 40+ years of tradition and have the Doctor choose love over the universe (at least for a little while). But as you have so eloquently demonstrated, there are plenty of ways to make it work and still keep the integrity of the show intact. Either a Ten/Ten II switcheroo or Ten spending the rest of Rose's life with her then returning to saving the universe would be a perfectly acceptable solution.
And they soooooooo need to get away from the emo. I'm tired of Dark Depressing Doctor. Not that I don't love David, 'cause you know I do, but there's only so much of that that one can take. I'd love for Ten to get his time with Rose and then regenerate as a happier man, back to traveling the universe and enjoying himself.
Do I think it will happen? There's the rub. I know that RTD says he likes happy endings, but I worry that he just can't see past his blindspots to make it happen here. I'm not cynical enough to say that there's no way it'll happen, just realistic enough about RTD (and the DW franchise) to say that there's a good chance it won't.
However, that doesn't mean that I give up hope! I will still be wishing on that blue moon that we get our Pony. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-31 04:01 am (UTC)First I have to say that you are a true gift to the human soul. I've never met or read anyone who so clearly understands the beauty of a wonderful story that will tap into your inner core and change your perspective on life as well as the world around it.
Second, I commend you for writing such a personal entry. I love it! I had so much faith in the pony before (due to you which was very much needed after JE) but now it's beaming out of me. I even have my husband reading your entries with me to understand why we all need this ending to be just in regards to the Doctor.
Mr. Davies had brought me out of this perspective of "nothing is worth being emotionally invested in on TV because it always leaves you heart broken". I get very emotionally attached to a story and I am left crushed when the ending does not justify the plot that was created in the first place. This has happened with many shows because, I fear, it is due to actors leaving or they want to keep the franchise going so they sacrifice the story. Doctor Who was a summary of many emotions and ideas to me: pain, loss, fear, resistance, happiness, love, lust, rejection, loneliness and and I could go on forever with these....
I doesn't make any sense to me how a writer with such a talent for understanding what it means to feel could give us anything other than what is right for the story and the characters (even if some of the audience is unwilling to see the Doctor in a different light). I will continue to beam about the pony I hope we all receive...and if it should go another way then I will be severely disappointed in Davies (as well as the actors/actresses since they obviously know what the story needs).
Keep writing my pony loving mentor!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-31 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-31 11:38 am (UTC)Now, all we need is the "Lover's meeting" part.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-08 02:58 am (UTC)